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Criminal Leviathans: How Gangs Govern, Organize Crime, and Threaten the State from Behind Bars

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Criminal Leviathans: How Gangs Govern, Organize Crime, and Threaten the State from Behind Bars

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From Brazil to El Salvador, prison gangs have transformed the state's disciplinary institutions into headquarters for building drug empires, organizing street crime, and orchestrating terrorist attacks capable of bringing the state to heel. At the same time, they govern, “providing order and physical safety for millions of low-income residents across vast informal peripheries neglected by governments. The fruit of decades of resorting to repressive strategies to address underlying social problems, these criminal shadow-governments simultaneously defy and undergird the neoliberal state, in the process creating a stubborn specter of non-state authority. Dr. Lessing analyzes the Primer Comando de Capital in Brazil and find that the PCC’s monopoly in São Paulo is not a “natural” one, but rather supported, if inadvertently, by state policy.